SHIELT – Shelf life 4 plant-based alternatives

Challenges for plant-based meat alternatives

Plant-based meat alternatives bring new challenges for microbial stability. This product category is highly permissive to microbial growth due to its relatively high water activity and pH. Microbial contaminants, as for example bacterial spore formers (e.g., spoilage and pathogenic species), can be introduced with plant-based protein ingredients and may survive the processes applied for manufacturing, alternatively, recontamination at later steps in the process may introduce them.

Knowledge on preservation hurdles and process intensities required to control spoilage is still limited. Moreover, product formulations proven successful to stabilize animal protein products may not work for their plant-based counterparts and batch-to-batch variation can be high, in addition heat treatment intensities may not be applicable to plant proteins.

SHIELT: Prediction and control of shelf life

The development of predictive tools for inactivation and growth of relevant spoilage organisms in plant-based products will assist producers to select optimal strategies to control spoilage, lower food loss and shorten time from idea to market.

The aim of the SHIELT project is to develop predictive models for shelf life of plant-based meat alternatives. Wageningen Food & Biobased Research has developed miniaturized plant-based products mimicking the real product composition and were used for development of Listeria monocytogenes growth models (see PROSPECT project). In the SHIELT project, these will be used for development of predictive tools for other microbial contaminants for shelf life of plant-based meat alternatives.

The project is expected to lead to:

• Knowledge on the relevant spoilage microbiome of plant-based meat alternatives (a head start is being made in 2024 in a Seed Money project).
• Enrichment of existing databases with new growth and inactivation data for relevant contaminants (both retrieved from literature using AI-powered search strategies and experimental data generation)
• Mathematical models to predict effects of product parameters, matrix composition, processing, and storage conditions on product shelf life.
• Window of application for processing conditions in combination with preservatives that minimally interfere with product quality to increase shelf life of plant-based meat alternatives.

Invitation to join

Companies developing or aiming to improve, their plant-based meat portfolio are invited to join this consortium. Also, companies active in packaging solutions, ingredients solutions or processing technologies are more than welcome in this consortium. In return for in-cash and in-kind contributions to the project, partners can help specify topics for the project provide direction to the research activities.